Born the son of a sharecropper,he spent the first twenty-six years of his his life on the Drouillard Plantation in Point Coupee,Louisiana.As one of twelve children born to George Frederick & Armantine Dalcourt.In 1890 he left the plantation and headed to New Orleans to attend Straight University,from which he graduated four years later.His goal in life was to become a physician,Rivers enrolled in the Medical College of New Orleans University he after after two years in 1896 for Chicago to enroll at the College of Physicians and surgeons (now the University of Chicago at Chicago Medical School).If he had stayed in New Orleans,he would not have been able to study in any of the city's hospital since African American medical students were not permitted to do so.
While in Chicago,never received scholarships that were available to other students,but financed his entire education with assistance from family members and by tutoring other medical students on campus.In 1897,Rivers not only received his M.D. he also became the first African American to graduate from this institution.
After graduation,Rivers,was one of the few American medical students of any race
awarded an 18 month internship to the John B.Murphy Surgical Clinic at Cook Hospital in Chicago.Only twelve of the
sixty-four graduates of Chicago's College of Physicians & Surgeons,based on their
performance in a two day competitive examination,received such an honor that year.Dr.Frederick was one of them.
Finally,after giving it a great deal of thought,Rivers decided to come back home to Louisiana to practice medicine.It was in 1899 Louisiana had fewer than fifty African-American for an African American population of
over a half million people.He was one of the few African Americans southerns to get his medical education in the North and return to his native region to establish his career.
Upon returning to Pointe Coupee,he was able to establish himself as the parish physician for both African-Americans & whites.He soon developed a large racially mixed clientele.While Pointe Coupee's white community
was able to accept medical treatment from Dr.Frederick,his marriage to a white woman (Adele Boule) was too
much to take,and soon he was run out of town by hostile white community.
He then fled to Central America with his bride and became surgeon-in-chief at small government hospital in Spanish Honduras.He contracted malaria while there and after four years returned to his home state,but this time setting in New Orleans and not Pointe Coupee.It was then that he developed a successful practice and began to get the recognition he rightly so deserved.
Upon Rivers his return,he became assistant of surgery at the old Flint Medical School,
then chief surgeon at the old Sarah Goodridge Hospital on Canal Street.There were only six Negro doctors in New Orleans at that time.From 1913-1932,he was surgeon working for the Southern Pacific Railroad Company.Finally,in 1932 when Flint-Goodridge was established,Dr.Rivers was appointed chief of surgery.In post-graduate courses conducted each year by the hospital,he taught alongside doctors from Tulane and LSU medical schools.Under Dr.Frederick,Federick-Goodridge maintained its AHA standards and enlisted the city's finest white physicians to practice there along with its African-American physicians.He would continue to serve on the staff for more than forty years.
In spite of all his accomplishments,Dr.Frederick was denied membership in both the America College of Surgeons and the international College for many years because of racism.For years he traveled across the state,lecturing to an talking with young African American doctors.He even helped one young surgeon establish himself in New Orleans by giving him an office (rent free) for four years as he built his practice.On November 2,1947,the Flint-Goodridge testimonial service honored Dr.Frederick for fifty years of medical practice.In 1950,Dr.Frederick stepped down as chief of Surgery to become its Consultant in Surgery He was awarded the first Dillard University Alumni Achievement Award.In 1954,he received a National Medical Association Distinguished Service Award and was honored by the New Orleans Branch of the NAACP for over half a century to his community.After his death,he would be honored posthumously when an African American school in New Orleans (previously named for Jefferson Davis) was rechristened as Rivers Frederick.He would receive many other awards...too numerous to mention here.Dr.Rivers passed away at the very same hospital he so loved.He left behind his widow,Eloise Clark Frederick and three children:Pearl,Lolita,and Rivers Frederick Jr....
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